Since its GoT season again I figured I could do something for my favorite character: Arya~

guh.

Have I ever said how much I Iove his relationship with the Stark sisters? No? Well I bleeping love it.

Stark sisters when they were younger 

His girls

George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (via whatdogsdotowolves)

Arya and Sandor

I can’t be the only one that’s thought of this. Often times when I see people discuss the time Arya and Sandor spent together it to discuss how that part of her journey served to teach her some valuable lessons.

But I have another idea. Yes, Arya gets some great character development during their time together, but I can’t help but feel GRRM used her more as a witness to Sandor than anything else. He could have chosen so many different paths for her that would have served the same purpose for her character. Instead he used her, an already established POV to bring back a non POV character that we had already spent a lot of time getting to know in kings landing and who he clearly has bigger plans for as the story unfolds.

During that time period Sandor was in crisis, he had snapped, and as a result completely unraveled the only life he had known since boyhood. Arya is witnessing a long, drawn out emotinal breakdown and she’s becoming increasingly aware of it. She notices his moods, she notices that he’s “lost”, she witnesses his outbursts (the whole chippong wood in a blind rage until he passes out buisness), she notices he’s losing his will to even care about if she stays or goes. Arya is wonderfully observant and she notices things in the people around her that others may not.

George wants us to witness this process with Sandor, because it’s important for his role in the story to come. Since he had already chosen to send Sandor away from kings landing and since, in my opinion, Sandor is a character best left as a non POV, he needed to pair him up with someone else so we’d still get to follow his journey.

In short, I think their time together is more important to Sandor’s development than Arya.

I couldn’t agree more with your view, I agree that the ultimate intention of that sort of road movie is for us readers to witness how he breaks apart. Through Arya’s eyes we get to know how he feels and the kind of man he really is. He is not the awful villain he seemed to be at first and even Arya relutctantly realises that. This is why she stops bringing out his name in her black list. 

She is there to make us realise how he became what he is. And as a consequence, what wil become of her if she is eaten up by hatred and desire for retribution, just like Sandor.

I agree with you, because although it’s true that he serves a purpose in helping her reach her next destiny in Bravos, the main purpose is to show us his breakdown until he reaches his lowest point. For some reason he is important in George’s story and Sandor remains more interesting if we see him through other characters’ eyes. Some characters are better this way and he is one of them, I think.

Arya has had many mentors in her journey, she leant something from each of them and any of them could have been her travel companion instead of Sandor. But showing them together allowed us to see how they mirror each other (she mirroring his past and him her potential future). And not only this, she served as our eyes and ears to witness who Sandor Clegane really is.

It doesn’t matter so much what she learnt in his company but what we as readers learnt. She was too angry and two young to look at Sandor with compassion, but many readers could see him as what a traumatized child could become, just like Arya. They are more similar than many readers dare to accept or both Arya and Sandor could realise.

Arya and Sandor by Ysenna

They broke their fast in silence, until Sandor said, “This thing about your mother …”“It doesn’t matter,” Arya said in a dull voice. “I know she’s dead. I saw her in a dream.”

Arya Stark by znodden

Just little sketch 

Arya and Sandor by Ysenna

They broke their fast in silence, until Sandor said, “This thing about your mother …”“It doesn’t matter,” Arya said in a dull voice. “I know she’s dead. I saw her in a dream.”

In ASOS Arya tries to kill the Hound three times and all three times it’s mentioned explicitly that his eyes open or he looks at her, and she then falters enough for someone to disarm her.  

Then take Ned’s words in AGOT:

“If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look him in the eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”

The situations are not really comparable, but Arya is carrying out her specific form of justice against ppl who have harmed her family, and she somehow doesn’t kill Sandor Clegane even though she spent a lot of time in his company. And since the final time she didn’t kill him probably led to him being saved by the Elder Brother then, in the author’s own words (sort of), Sandor Clegane doesn’t deserve to die.    

Arya by AlcoholicRattleSnake

Arya Stark by zilvania

The fence by sprrow

Arya Stark by LuLebel